Video footage of early Siemens SX45 prototype

While looking at old footage from CeBit (used to be a huge IT trade show in Germany) I found this interesting footage of a prototype of the first Windows CE PocketPC/phone combination.
While eventually released as a Siemens branded product, the insides were mostly a Cassiopeia E-125 with a phone module. This prototype is literally just a Cassiopeia E-125 with a chunky phone module on the back, the SX45 that eventually got released looked much nicer of course.

Here's the video: https://youtu.be/H7yfdA4rj14?t=630

And here's what the released PDA looked like:

Thinking it reminds me more of the EM-500.

Which was my first eBay fraud sale. But I eventually got paid for it 3x over!

Yes, EM-500 or E-700 looks a little bit more similar, esp. the curve.

Yeah the final design was probably inspired by the EM-500, but the prototype was simply an E-125 with a gsm module

[EDIT] I remembered wrong, it was of course a Casio E-105 it was based on! It's been a while

Edited by Karpour 2019-11-17 1:09 AM

So if it was E-105, it had Palm-size PC on it? Neat. We've come a long way since then.

Okay I get my Cassiopeias all mixed up now, but looking closer it actually seems like this prototype was running WCE 2.11
See the attached screenshot, you can vaguely see the antenna at the top, the Siemens branding and the UI





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Did you see Bill Gates a week and a half ago offering the view that the US anti-trust was the reason Microsoft never got anywhere in SmartPhones?
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=bill+gates+mobile+antitrust&t=...

Do you think that's a fair assessment, or were MS too wedded to dated UI thinking and expensive, difficult to enter coding paradigms for Android not to have taken off?

The UI that focused on stylus input, which was so from Windows CE 1.0 was probably one reason why Windows Mobile faded out. If Microsoft had switched quickly to touch screen by fingers, it might have been a different story.

And also, in the first few years, I felt iPhones had a clear advantage over other smartphones...

Such a hard question. I think they could have had the advantage by creating a smartphone OS from scratch, rather than patching up Windows CE. I never tried one of the later windows mobile phones with actual touch UI, but I guess by then it was too little, too late.
I somehow doubt that if Bill Gates had been more focused, they would have done too much differently

There is no great need in new OS other than Windows CE given that they write good software package on top of it. Linux has advantage of having wide support of hardware though (even more so after Android success).

Edited by Alt Bass 2019-11-19 9:53 PM